I think it's actually a party favor, but it's essentially a white foam tube--the consistency is similar to those foam pool noodles, only smaller--wrapped around a series of different colored LED lights. There are five settings, so you can have the light saber flash red (Darth Vader), blue (Obi Wan), green (Luke Skywalker circa "Return of the Jedi"), slow rainbow (in which it cycles through all the colors, including all the in-between colors like purple and pink and turquoise), and Cal's personal favorite, ULTRA-KINETIC RAINBOW STROBE (likely not recommended for epileptics--it is kind of intense).

They are cheap and they are blunt and they are foam so even if someone gets hit in the face with it...several times...no one will be the worse for wear. Also probably a nice party favor for your next Star Wars-themed birthday party-slash-rave.

(I remember, back when Cal was wee, when I used to have this blanket rule that we wouldn't allow any kind of mock weaponry in the house on the basis that it would promote aggression or something. I WAS SO YOUNG THEN. Later I realized that basically everything could become a light saber, including the cardboard core of gift paper wrap. Not very sturdy, those, and oh, THE TEARS when they eventually bent and unravelled.)

(I still have a "no toy gun" rule, though. Not even water guns. Unless they are shaped like a non-gun, like, I don't know, a dolphin that squirts water. I don't like guns.)

15 comments:

ha! i have an almost 6-month old boy and i also won't allow any mock weaponry in the house. but i'm so young, right? (but definitely no toy guns! ever!)also my parents had this rule, and i always felt a bit sorry for my baby brother, who had to visit our neighbour's little boy so he could play boy's games from time to time... and i don't even think he really liked that little boy.

Anna: through the virtue of sound editing, instead of hearing me tell them, "Watch the stairs, watch the stairs guys, GET AWAY FROM THE STAIRS!" instead you hear the incandescent John Williams score. :)

I have two boys too, also started out with "no weaponry", have also now ended up with a variety of nerf type swords/axes/hammers, and will definitely get these. My "no toy gun" rule has been derailed by the fact that my kids keep MAKING guns- out of bread, paper, action figures, and otherwise pretending that our non-gun-shaped water guns are, well, guns.

I was a bit concerned about the weapons and fighting thing with my son. When I first saw him playing with his older sisters' Barbies I asked him if I could also play. "No, they're not playing, Daddy. They're fighting." Of course.

My sons are now 25 and 28 and I had the same gun prohibition (we're all young naive mothers at first) until they began to fashion guns from household objects, sticks from the yard, finally building them from Legos. I grew tired and ceded that battle. One is now a master marksman and the other totally lost interest.

Yeah, they're going to make the guns, despite what we want. And as long as they don't point them at me or tell me I'm dead, I can go with the flow. But that is very different from me actually buying a toy gun for them. Which will never happen.

This makes me smile. I'm from a conservative household that always had real guns (hey, on a ranch you need them, unless you want to get eaten by a moutain lion or something...I won't get into my views on guns in the urban area, as this isn't the place) and we never had interest in the toy guns. Now that I look back on it though, we had super soakers...I just never assciated them with actual guns!